Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson

Fred Parker

Abstract

‘The more we enquire, the less we can resolve’, wrote Johnson. Scepticism — a reasoned emphasis on the severe limitations of rationality — would seem to undermine the grounds of belief and action. But in some of the best 18th-century literature, a theoretically paralysing critique of the pretensions of reason, precept, and language went hand in hand with a vigorous intellectual, ethical, and linguistic confidence. The conjunction of philosophy with literature is crucial; to realize philosophical scepticism as literature was effectively to transform it; and to perceive this transformation is to ... More

‘The more we enquire, the less we can resolve’, wrote Johnson. Scepticism — a reasoned emphasis on the severe limitations of rationality — would seem to undermine the grounds of belief and action. But in some of the best 18th-century literature, a theoretically paralysing critique of the pretensions of reason, precept, and language went hand in hand with a vigorous intellectual, ethical, and linguistic confidence. The conjunction of philosophy with literature is crucial; to realize philosophical scepticism as literature was effectively to transform it; and to perceive this transformation is to understand how and where intelligent thinking may be necessarily literary. The book traces the presence of this life-giving irony in works by Pope (An Essay on Man and the Horatian Epistle to Bolingbroke), Hume (the Treatise, Enquiries, and Dialogues), Sterne (Tristram Shandy), and Johnson (especially Rasselas); discusses its source in Locke and its inspiration in Montaigne, and relates it more broadly to the social self-consciousness of 18th-century culture, and to the pressures on religious belief. The argument serves as a reminder that radical scepticism is not a peculiarly modern (or postmodern) invention, and that its strategies and implications have never been more interestingly explored than in the 18th-century, to ultimately affirmative effect.

End Matter

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